Kilchoman Sanaig Cask Strength 2024 Edition released

The Machir Bay cask strength bottlings occasionally released by Kilchoman enjoyed great popularity among Kilchoman fans. They showed Kilchoman’s standard whisky from an even more fruity side.

It is therefore not surprising that Kilchoman was repeatedly asked to bottle the second general release Sanaig at cask strength.

So far, only the participants of the “DNA” online tasting at Fèis Ìle 2021 have had the opportunity to taste a Sanaig Cask Strength, where it was met with great enthusiasm.

Now Kilchoman has heeded the calls of fans and launched a Sanaig release at cask strength for the first time. The bottling in the Dark Batch variant (see below) comes with a strong 57.8% abv. This promises rich peat smoke interacting with aromas of citrus fruits, spices and cocoa.

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In 2016, Kilchoman had made its sherry cask-influenced NAS malt Sanaig, named after an inlet north west of the distillery, which had already appeared in a few selected countries in 2015, its second ‘General Release’ bottling (after Machir Bay).

At around 5 years old, Sanaig is the same age as Machir Bay, but has a heavy oloroso cask influence in contrast to the predominantly ex-Bourbon cask-matured Machir Bay. Both fully matured oloroso sherry casks – namely the smaller sherry hogsheads – and bourbon casks that received a sherry finish are used.

To highlight the different sherry-bourbon cask influence of its two main expressions, the packaging features a “cask influence bar”, which indicates a sherry cask influence of approx. 10% for the Machir Bay and approx. 70% for the Sanaig.

Just like Machir Bay, Sanaig is bottled in batches. Nowadays, 17 casks are vatted for each batch, 16 hogsheads (sherry hogsheads and sherry hogshead finishes) and one sherry butt. The individual batches differ relatively little from each other. The so-called “dark batches”, the first of which came out at the end of 2019, caused some discussion among whisky fans. Their colour is significantly darker than that of the previous ‘normal’ batches, even darker than that of the »Loch Gorm«. The colour difference was initially just a coincidence of some particularly colour-active sherry casks used in this batch; in terms of taste, the difference to the lighter batches is minimal. However, it soon became apparent that the ‘dark batches’ sold much better than the lighter versions, which is why Kilchoman has since tried to deliberately achieve a darker colour by using particularly colour-active casks supplied by the Miguel Martin bodega.

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